Even A Blind Squirrel Finds A Nut

The following has been bothering me for a while now, among other things. The concept/word of entertainment. When I think of that word I feel its emptiness and disgust at myself at the same time. To me, entertainment includes things like TV, movies, casual readings (magazines & novels for ex.), meaningless outings, solitaire... etc. Entertainment is that which carries no (or very little) beneficial value to the individual but consumes time. I don't think I have to define it further, you know what it means and you know when you're engaging in it.

It sickens me how much time I, and everybody else, spend being entertained! I am fine if you're sitting at a doctor's clinic for example waiting to be admitted and you entertain yourself. It's ok to pick up that magazine. But to actively seek entertainment and make it a goal is depressing. I mean what the hell??? Have we run out of things to learn, problems to solve, or people to help that we just decide to give our time up. To talk about new movies, to gossip about celebrities, to talk about new cars, to play backgammon for hours in a cafe smoking shisha... it's all the same. What are we waiting for? Are we waiting to die and just entertaining yourself till that happens? We're never gonna be this young again. I have a feeling when we grow older we're not gonna look back and cherish the time we've spent watching mindless sitcoms that we've seen many times before!

I wanna cry for all the time that I've spent on such things. What if I had used this time to learn a new language? or get a degree? or educating myself about an interesting topic? or start a project? Forget all that. How about if we had just spent this time contemplating what we wanna do our your lives? What we wanna accomplish before it's all over? Oh well... All I can do from now on is be aware of the high price of entertainment and try to keep it to a minimum. Even if this is just a pointless reflection on my part, at least I'll be self-aware next time I give my life away.

I'm gonna leave you with this excerpt on the thoughts of Martin Heidegger from a book I was reading:

But the danger we face is a sort of everydayness; the danger that the thousand and one cares and little things that we have to deal with in our daily living will take us over. We are in danger of being reduced to the status of utensil. A tool, a utensil, has meaning only if people use it for their own ends. Everydayness is the tapestry of events that tends to reduce us to utensil status, impoverishing or openness to Being, locking us into limited horizons, reducing possibilities, being absorbed into the status of a being, losing the meaning of our own being.